Stonewall by Martin Duberman Page A

his interest—though, as always, he did enjoy being behind the scenes in a structured situation that emphasized detail work. By the time Foster Sr. moved to Florida in 1953, following his marriage to his secretary (after a long-standing affair), Foster Jr. had decided he wanted to leave the firm to pursue an academic career. That hardly seemed a logical choice, given his mediocre undergraduate record, but, with the psychological testing results to bolster him, Foster felt that his previous under-par performance had been due to boredom with the subject matter of his courses. Of recent years he had begun to develop an interest in psychology, and as he did so, apathy toward academic study had given way to enthusiasm. Foster decided to enroll at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, for a master’s degree. His intention was to continue on to an eventual doctorate and to a life in academia.
    But his reentry into the academic world was not easy. He found himself unable to concentrate for very long. His mind wandered when he read, and his interest wavered from subject to subject. No sooner had he enrolled at Trinity than he began to increase his involvement with barbershop quartets. No sooner had he started out in psychology than he began to take elective courses in philosophy.
    By the mid-fifties he was spending more time with barbershoppers than with academics, and he began to doubt whether he was really cut out to be a student and scholar after all. But he did get confirmation and encouragement from various quarters. His professors gave him uniformly high grades, and as one of the college officials wrote Gunnison Sr., “Foster’s record here speaks for itself. I think I need not tell you that few people achieve such excellence.”
    Moreover, one of the most touted young professors in the school went out of his way to praise Foster’s abilities. Paul W. Kurtz, an assistant professor of philosophy at Trinity, had only gotten his own doctorate at Columbia in 1952, yet was already regarded as one of the guiding lights behind the emerging movement of humanism—and as an inspiring teacher as well. His sympathy for metaphysical speculation, at a time when logical positivism had taken over philosophy, appealed both to Foster’s penchant for the “big questions” and to his pronounced psychological identification with the underdog. ThoughKurtz was very nearly the same age as Foster, he played a major role in arousing Foster’s dormant academic abilities and interests. He might even be said to have become something of a surrogate father—except that this time, the father’s interest seemed genuine. When Kurtz went to Venice in the summer of 1958 to attend the International Philosophical Congress, he took Foster with him and the two did some traveling together en route to the congress. Foster seemed at last to have found a congenial mentor and an academic home, and by 1958 he had formally enrolled as a student in both psychology and philosophy.
    But the college dean had begun to suggest that he was being dilatory in completing his master’s degree in psychology. Foster had chosen to make his thesis an evaluation of Adorno’s study of the authoritarian personality, drawn to it, perhaps, as a way of better understanding the context of his own upbringing. But it was not until 1960, his sixth year in graduate school, that he was finally able to complete the thesis and earn his degree. The psychology faculty awarded him a grade of 97—the thesis apparently contained a genuinely original mathematical formula—but then reduced the grade to a 90 because of the inordinate amount of time he had taken.
    With the master’s in psychology behind him, Foster continued to pursue a second degree in philosophy with Paul Kurtz. But just as he was about to begin his thesis, Kurtz announced that he was leaving Trinity to teach elsewhere. He later encouraged Foster to join him in promoting